Chamber of Commerce Quotes

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

Unemployment is of vital importance, particularly to the unemployed.

Millions of Americans are either underemployed or unemployed.

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

Unemployed people are spoiled

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

The right-wingers don't want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.

Being unemployed - or working at minimum wage - is rough in the best of circumstances.

Look how many millions of people are underemployed or have lost their jobs. The last thing I'm going to do is play politics with their future.

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

You see, you can't put joblessness in a jail cell.

We can't afford as a nation - not because of money but because of our social fabric - to have large numbers of people who are not working.

We have to challenge the whole idea that it's acceptable for a society like Britain to have such a significant number of people who do not work one day of the week and don't have any possibility of improving the quality of their lives.

The people who do not get jobs are often the most vulnerable in our society, and joblessness is a terrible plight for anyone who suffers from it.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

There's nothing more unfair than a guy that doesn't have a job.

People without jobs cannot be expected to behave in a lawful, measured way.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

Unemployment is painful.

We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination.

What kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

For instance, twelve men are struggling for employment in a trade where there is only room for eight ; four are driven out of that trade, but they are not trampled out of existence. A good deal of competition merely decides what kind of work a man is to do though of course when a man can only do one kind of work, it may easily become a struggle for bare life.

It's wrong that so many hardworking people - people working full-time, or even multiple jobs - need public assistance just to survive.

The problem is not that the U.S. economy won't be able to take care of its citizens - it is that taking away benefits, creating intergenerational warfare, and scapegoating will make for very difficult and bad politics. This is a tragedy that we can see coming. Early action would be relatively painless.